On the Application of Biometric Techniques for Locating Damaged Artworks

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1 On the Application of Biometric Techniques for Locating Damaged Artworks Andreas Lanitis (1), Nicolas Tsapatsoulis (2), Anastasios Maronidis (1) (1) Visual Media Computing Lab, Dept. of Multimedia and Graphic Arts Cyprus University of Technology {andreas.lanitis, (2) Dept. of Communication and Internet Studies Cyprus University of Technology Keywords. Biometrics, Forensics, Looted Damaged Art, Icon Restoration, Icon Identification. Abstract. The continuously increasing art market activity and international art transactions lead the market for stolen and fraudulent art to extreme levels. According to US officials, art crime is the third-highest grossing criminal enterprise worldwide. As a result, art forensics is a rising research field dealing with the identification of stolen or looted art and their collection and repatriation. Photographs of artwork provide, in several cases, the only way to locate stolen and looted items. However, it is quite common these items to be damaged as a result of excavation and illegal movement. Digital processing of photographs of damaged artwork is, therefore of high importance in art forensics. This processing emphasizes on object restoration and although techniques from the field of image restoration can be applied it is of high importance to take into account the semantics of the artwork scene and especially the structure of objects appeared therein. In this paper, we assess the application of face image restoration techniques, applied on damaged faces appearing in Byzantine icons, in an attempt to identify the actual icons. Several biometric measurements and facial features along with a set of rules related to the design of Byzantine faces are utilized for this purpose. Preliminary investigation, applied on 25 icons, shows promising results. 1 Introduction Looted art has been a consequence of looting during war, natural disaster and riot for centuries. Looting of art, archaeology and other cultural property may be an opportunistic criminal act or may be a more organized case of unlawful or unethical pillage by the victor of a conflict [2]. As the demand for artifacts increases, criminal groups respond promptly with an unfailing supply of illegally obtained or excavated objects by plundering cultural sites, destroying their context and significance [5]. Renfrew [19] noted: the single largest source of destruction of the archaeological

2 heritage today is through looting the illicit, unrecorded and unpublished excavation to provide antiquities for commercial profit. According to FBI and UNESCO records, looting and trade of antiquities has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry and constitutes the third most profitable illegal traffic after narcotics and arms [5]. As a result, art forensics is a rising research field dealing with the identification of stolen or looted art and their collection and repatriation. Art crime lawyers, forensic experts, computer scientists, and other major players working on legal, forensic, governmental, and political join their efforts to address the enormity of this phenomenon. Insufficient standardized procedures, the lack of reliable data and the pressing need for improvement of methods employed in forensic practice, have been recognized by the National Academic of Sciences with the publication in 2009 of a scientific report stating: It is clear that change and advancements, both systematic and scientific, are needed in a number of forensic disciplines to ensure the reliability of work, establish enforceable standards, and promote best practices with consistent application [17]. This is also true in the case of looting and illicit trade of antiquities. As the origin of looted artifacts is primarily unknown, typological and stylistic studies do not always provide strong support in criminal justice cases for the artifacts attribution and repatriation. Scientific investigations of incidents involving stolen or looted art pose many technological difficulties. Methods providing proof beyond reasonable doubt are therefore required to help assign the precise location of origin / provenance through: chemical composition analyses; isotopic fingerprinting; or through other types of analysis that can identify diagnostic markers for an accurate attribution. This paper deals with a very early stage of art forensics, that of locating artwork which might be stolen or looted, with the aid of simple digital photographs. Since stolen or looted artwork is in many cases damaged (i.e., cutting a larger artwork into small pieces for easy carrying) digital processing of artwork photographs is necessary. This processing is in some cases similar to the classical image restoration. However, the aim here is to digitally restore the objects that appear in the artwork scene. Therefore, it is important to take into account the semantics of the artwork scene and especially the structure of objects appeared therein. In this paper, we assess the application of face image restoration techniques, applied on damaged faces appearing in Byzantine icons, in an attempt to identify the actual icons. Several biometric measurements and facial features along with a set of rules related to the design of Byzantine faces are utilized for this purpose. In the remainder of the paper we present a brief literature review followed by the description of the case study considered in this paper. In Section 4 we describe the experimental set up and present results. Conclusions and plans for future work are presented in Section 5. 2

3 2 Literature Review The art forensics is a new research field. Application of image processing techniques in this field is limited. However, there is a quite extensive literature concerning applications of digital image processing in cultural heritage. This paper borrows several ideas from these techniques and especially from the area of digital restoration of artwork. A variety of digital image processing techniques have been used in cultural heritage applications for guiding the actual restoration process (e.g. cleaning dirty paintings) or for providing virtual restoration. Morphological techniques and Radial Basis Function (RBF) Neural Networks (NN) have been utilized for crack detection, while order statistics and anisotropic diffusion have been used for crack filling in paintings [11, 20]. In a similar perspective, a methodology based on the Retinex theory of human vision for chromatic restoration of paintings has been proposed by Drago & Chiba [10]. Watermarking techniques have also been applied for protecting the digital reproduction of artworks as well as for simulating the actual restoration process [9]. A from local to whole approach methodology to remove cracks from old paintings and frescoes is presented in [3]. The Byzantine icon restoration methodology adopted in this paper combines established statistical methods for occlusion detection and texture restoration on human faces. For instance, in [24], the eyeglasses of a face are removed by learning the joint distribution between pairs of face images with and without eyeglasses from a database. Moreover, in [12, 18, 23] methods for facial occlusion based on recursive PCA reconstruction are described. The occluded regions are restored by iteratively processing the difference between the PCA-reconstructed and the original image. 3 Case Study 3.1 Byzantine Icons Byzantine art refers to the artistic style associated with Byzantine Empire. A large number of Byzantine icons and frescoes showing different Saints, dating back to the 15th century, can be found in churches and monasteries mainly in Eastern Europe. Like numerous other forms of artwork, a number of Byzantine icons of archeological value have been stolen and traded illegally [8]. Especially in the case of frescoes the process of extracting artworks from walls usually causes damages on the original artifacts. Similarly in the case of stolen icons the illegal transportation coupled with non-careful handling, often inflicts damages. 3.2 Byzantine Icon Restoration In [13, 16] an integrated methodology that can be used for detecting and restoring

4 damages on digitized Byzantine icons is described. The icon restoration method was influenced by the work of professional Byzantine icon conservators. It relies on the use of rules that describe the geometric and chromatic structure of faces appearing in Byzantine icons [22]. The restoration framework was also influenced by previous research efforts in the area of biometrics and in particular in the area of detecting and eliminating occlusions on human face images [12, 18, 24]. However, because faces in Byzantine icons are governed by unique geometrical and chromatic rules, face image processing algorithms were customized for dealing with the unique case of Byzantine style. The final application consists of several modules that include landmark annotation, shape restoration, damage detection and texture restoration. Given a damaged face appearing in a Byzantine icon, its shape, as this is defined by a set of 68 landmarks, is recovered through a 3D reconstruction process [4], using a Byzantine specific shape model that has been trained by imposing a set of Byzantine geometric rules on a generic human face model [13]. Detection of damaged areas on the shape-restored face involves the estimation of the residuals obtained after the coding and reconstruction of the face image regions using trained Principal Component Analysis (PCA) texture models. Extracted residuals can be used as the basis for obtaining information about the amount of damage and the positions of damaged regions [15]. The texture of damage-detected regions is, then, restored by utilizing the Recursive PCA algorithm. This is an iterative scheme based on data-driven statistical information [18]. Given a dataset consisting of non-damaged Byzantine faces, a texture model is trained. Changing the parameters of the model results in several synthetic face instances. In a partially damaged face image, the occluded regions are firstly located using the aforementioned automatic occlusion detection method and replaced by the corresponding regions of the nearest face, in terms of intensity distance, from the dataset. The resulting face is coded in model parameters and back reconstructed in the initial face space. Pixel residuals that correspond to the damaged areas between the initial and the reconstructed face are calculated. The above code-reconstruction process is repeated until the total residual is minimized. As a result of the restoration process, an overall 3D instance of the restored face is created. The final step of the restoration phase involves the projection of the 3D instance onto the original 2D face, so that the restored model instance overlaps with the damaged face, completing in that way the process of digital restoration. The developed algorithms have been incorporated within an integrated userfriendly software application that can be used for digital restoration of faces appearing in Byzantine icons. The application performs all of the above functionalities, i.e. damage detection, shape restoration and texture restoration. A quantitative experimental process proved the effectiveness of this Byzantine icon restoration framework [1]. 3.3 Identifying Damaged Stolen Icons Assuming that digital records of stolen Byzantine icons are available, we wish to have an automated system that indicates possible matches between a digital icon found in 4

5 different archives (i.e. internet sites) and the stored dataset of digital icons. Towards this end it is sufficient to use standard image similarity metrics that enable the identification of stolen artifacts. However, in the case that a stolen icon appears damaged, either as a result of normal condition degradation or as a result of human actions, the possible identification of such artwork may be inhibited. For example, Figures 1 and 2 show images of icons that were deliberately corrupted with damages and/or noise. The key question is whether it is still possible to obtain positive identifications between the distorted and original icons, despite the appearance transformations caused by damages and noise. Towards this end we propose to use the Byzantine icon restoration method described in section 3.2, in an attempt to minimize the effects of damages assisting in that way the positive identification of stolen icons. Figure 1 shows, also, examples of digitally restored images (right column), when the restoration method is applied to damaged images (Figure 1, center column). The question that arises concerns the possibility of improving the chances of locating stolen artwork based on the restored versions of the icons rather than utilizing damaged icons. 4 Experimental Evaluation A preliminary investigation that aims to assess the viability of using icon restoration for enhancing the chances of locating stolen icons is described in the following section. In our approach we only utilize data from the facial region because faces constitute a central part of Byzantine icons and as a result in digitized versions of (possibly stolen) icons the facial region is always shown, unlike other parts of an icon, such as labels, that may not be shown in order to impede the icon identification. 4.1 Experimental Set Up During the preliminary investigation 25 Byzantine icons were used. On each of the 25 icons, parts of the face were artificially damaged. For each face a set of 68 landmarks is located in order to enable the accurate derivation of facial features of the face shown in the image. Further to artificial damages imposed on the icons in the test set, noise, of three different types and increasing intensity, was also added. In particular the images were blurred using a Gaussian filter with standard deviations ranging from 0 to 50, salt and pepper noise covering 0% to 50% of the image and the correct positions of the landmarks were displaced by a random amount of 0 up to ±10 pixels. It should be noted that the displacement of the landmarks, although it does not affect the image itself, it affects the overall process of feature extraction. Furthermore in real applications it is expected to encounter non-accurate landmark localization, hence it is crucial to assess the effects of shape-displacement on the identification process. Examples of damaged and noise corrupted icons used in the experiments are shown in Figures 1 and 2. The feasibility of using restored icons was assessed through two main experiments.

6 Experiment 1: This experiment involves the comparison of the difference between image features derived from the original and damaged icons against the difference of image features between the original and restored icons. Experiment 2: In this experiment image features derived from either damaged or restored icons are used for identifying the actual icon against the original set of 25 icons used in the experiment. For the classification experiment a closest distance classifier was used because the primarily aim of this experiment was to assess the goodness of different features rather than the classifier itself. In addition the relatively small number of samples involved in this pilot study does not allow the training of more statistically rigorous classifiers. Fig. 1. Examples of original (left), artificially damaged (center) and restored icons (right) 4.2 Image Features For the two experiments described in section 4.1 six different types of features were used as the means of assessing the image similarity and/or identifying the damaged icon. The actual features used are: Shape Free Texture (SFT): The textures from the internal facial region are warped to a common shape and the intensities within the shape-normalized facial region are used as the feature vector. Active Shape Model (AAM) Parameters: The facial region is coded into a number of Active Appearance Model [6] parameters, using an AAM trained on 100 training Byzantine faces. AAM parameters describe in a compact way both the texture of a face and its facial shape as described by a set of 68 landmarks. Local Binary Patterns (LBP): The shape normalized internal facial region from an icon is divided into 33 patches and from each patch the LBP [1] is estimated. By concatenating the individual LBP vectors an overall feature vector is created. 6

7 Histogram of Oriented Gradients (MHOG): A bounding box of the facial area is divided in four windows (2x2) and a 36-dimension Histogram of Oriented Gradients [7] feature is computed in each window leading to a 144x1 vector representation (by concatenating the HOGs in the four windows). Local Histograms of Oriented Gradients (PHOG): Histogram of Oriented Gradients [7] derived at windows located on 68 key points of each face under consideration. These features highlight the local texture intensity fluctuations at the selected key points. Spatial Histogram of Key-points (SHIK): Based on an 8x8 fractal grid and SIFT [14] descriptors of 128 elements, each image is represented by a 64x128 element vector made of the concatenation of the accumulated SIFT descriptors ordered according to the order of fractal points so that the final descriptor does not depend on the number of SIFT key-points detected [21]. Fig. 2. Examples of noise corrupted icons. The top row shows blurred damaged icons (with sd=20), the middle row shows icons corrupted with 20% salt and pepper noise and the bottom row shows damaged icons with points displaced by ±6 pixels (red marks show the initial points and red marks the displaced points) 4.3 Experimental Results Experiment 1 (comparison of the difference between image features derived from the original and damaged icons): Figures 3, 4 and 5 show plots of the mean distance between feature vectors derived from damaged and original icons (blue lines) and the mean distance between feature vectors derived from restored and original icons (pink lines) among all samples in the test set, against the amount of noise added.

8 (a) (b) (c) (c) (d) (e) Fig. 3. From (a) to (f) mean distance for SFT, AAM, LBP, MHOG, PHOG and SHIK features when damaged icons are blurred with a Gaussian filter with sds ranging from 0 to 50. (a) (b) (c) (c) (d) (e) Fig. 4. From (a) to (f) mean distance for SFT, AAM, LBP, MHOG, PHOG and SHIK features when a percentage from 0-50 of damaged icons are corrupted with salt and pepper noise. (a) (b) (c) (c) (d) (e) Fig. 5. From (a) to (f) mean distance for SFT, AAM, LBP, MHOG, PHOG and SHIK features when landmarks on damaged images are displaced by 0-10 pixels. 8

9 In the case of the raw shape-free texture (SFT), AAM and SHIK features and despite the different types and amount of noise added on the damaged icons, the similarity between the restored faces and the original image remains always higher than in the case of the similarity between damaged and original icons. These findings indicate that the restoration process can play an important role in identifying damaged and/or noise corrupted icons. In general the performance of methods relying on local information (i.e. LPB, PHOG) is not as high as the introduction of noise effects distorts the local structure. Experiment 2 (icon identification based on a damaged or restored icon): Tables 1, 2 and 3 show the correct classification rates when features derived from damaged and restored icons, against the amount of noise added. According to the results, AAM features seem to be the most suitable for identifying damaged icons as in the case of using AAM-based features in most cases a 100% identification rate is achieved despite the corruption of the image with damages and noise. The only case that identification based on AAM s featured falls below 100% is the case involving increased shape displacement. Even in these cases classification based on the restored faces yields better results than classification based on the actual damaged icons. Although the classification performance of features relying on local structures (i.e. SHIK features) is worse than global features (i.e. AAM) under certain circumstances local features could be combined with global features in order to achieve improved overall performance. Table 1. Correct identification rates for ifferent features when damaged icons are blurred with a Gaussian filter with varying sds. SFT AAM LBP MHOG PHOG SHIK sd Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Damaged Restored

10 Table 2. Correct identification rates for ifferent features when a percentage from 0-50 of damaged icons are corrupted with salt and pepper noise. SFT AAM LBP MHOG PHOG SHIK Noise level 0% 5% 10% 20% 30% 50% Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Table 3. Correct identification rates for ifferent features when landmarks on damaged images are displaced by 0-10 pixels SFT AAM LBP MHOG PHOG SHIK Displacement ±0 ±2 ±4 ±6 ±8 ±10 Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Damaged Restored Conclusions A pilot study that aims to assess the feasibility of using digitally restored icons in an attempt to identify damaged icons with respect with a dataset of original icons. Within this context, damaged icons undergo a restoration process that aims to predict 10

11 the appearance of the missing parts, based on the appearance of the visible parts and a set of rules related to the design of Byzantine faces, incorporated in the restoration system. Preliminary results indicate that the use of the restored instead of the damaged icon, results in reduced differences in different feature spaces, enhancing in that way the chances of positive identifications of the icons involved. In the actual identification experiments for most features a noticeable improvement in identification performance is observed when utilizing digitally restored icons. Apart form few cases involving increased displacement of facial landmarks, AAM features achieve perfect identification performance using either damaged or restored faces. However, it is envisaged that the improved image similarity between a damaged icon and the original icon, observed when using AAM parameters extracted from a restored rather than a damaged icon will lead to improved identification performance when dealing with test sets containing large numbers of icons. IN the future we plan to stage extended experiments that will involve a large number of icons, in order to verify the early findings across a large number of test samples. In the future we also plan to investigate the use of other feature types and metrics that could potentially be used to offer enhanced identification performance between the restored icons and the original. We expect that our preliminary work and findings in this area will be expanded to cater for different types of artworks so that the efforts of preventing stealing, looting and trafficking of artworks are enhanced. 6 References [1] Ahonen, T., Hadid, A., & Pietikainen, M Face description with local binary patterns: Application to face recognition. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 28(12), [2] Atwood, R Stealing History, Tomb Raiders, Smugglers and the Looting of the Ancient World. St. Martin s Griffin, New York. [3] Barni M., Bartolini F., Cappellini V Image processing for virtual restoration of artworks. IEEE Multimedia, 7, [4] Blanz V., Vetter T Face recognition based on fitting 3D morphable model. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 25, [5] Bowman B. A Transnational Crimes Against Culture: Looting at Archaeological Sites and the ''Grey'' Market in Antiquities. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 24(3), [6] Cootes T.F, Edwards G.J, Taylor C.J Active Appearance Models. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 23(6), [7] Dalal, N., Triggs, B Histograms of Oriented Gradients for Human Detection. Proc. of the 2005 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp [8] Hadjisavvas, S The Destruction of the Archaeological Heritage of Cyprus. Trade in Illicit Antiquities: The Destruction of the World's Archaeological Heritage,

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